An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child in Massachusetts. An MS thirteen gang member from Al Salvador accused of murdering a Texas man of Venezuelan charged with filming and selling child pornography in Michigan. These are just some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President Donald J.
Trump's leadership.
I'm Christy nom the United States Secretary of Homeland Security. Under President Trump, attempted illegal border crossings are at the lowest levels ever recorded, and over one hundred thousand illegal aliens have been arrested. If you are here illegally, your next you will be fined nearly one thousand dollars a day, imprisoned, and deported.
You will never return.
But if you register using our CBP home app and leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.
Do what's right. Leave now.
Under President Trump, America's laws, border and families will be protected.
Sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security.
All right, gosh, welcome back, e y l. We are in Los Angeles.
An amazing LA time has been had.
Every time we come to LA, especially for Grammy Weekend. It's always a motion picture event for sure.
To say the least man to say the least is definitely most of the picture, and we're going out with a bang.
It's not over yet, not over, yes, So this is interesting. I think the first time that we met was with Baron Davis briefly for his event, right yep, that was all start Lake City and we want to panel together.
They were yeah, And.
Then we met in Davos and then we met.
You know what.
They were saying like, you got to meet this guy, you got to meet this guy. And I'm looking like, all right, who's the I'm like, oh right, we just we know, Ryan, we just be We didn't trying to make it happen for probably over a year. Yeah, but like any other you know, when the time is supposed to to come does and it happens in the right time.
Serious. So we ran into a Davos and it was it was love and it was like, we.
Have to do it now the time.
Here we are two weeks later.
So Ryan Breslo is foundering and chairman of Bolt, which is revolutionizing e commerce one click check out, you said PayPal two point zero.
Yeah, you can look at it as.
That, right, Yeah, I think that's the easiest way to describe it.
But you're serial entrepreneur. So you also started a company called Love Yeah. Right, that's the newest vibe that you got going on. Right, Yeah, that's a marketplace for alternative medicines.
It's a little different now. I think the last time I told you about it, it was but it's actually even crazier.
Idea.
I was trying to tell Troy at Davos and don't tell me. Yeah, You're like, don't tell me, So I didn't update you or correct. So it's different than that, all.
Right, So we'll get into it. And then you have Ego, right yep. And that's the crypto savings app.
Yeah, Crypto savings app and making crypto easier for the mainstream consumer.
Yeah. I feel like that's been your goal.
When I think about like the history of how you've built everything, it started there, right, Like it was how do I make things more efficient for the everyday person? Even like the one click payment is how to make things efficient for the everyday person?
Exactly? Yeah, how do you make things easy that currently aren't easy?
Yeah?
And I just I felt that about online check out, I felt that about crypto and so yeah, those and now it's love, which is all about conscious shopping and making that easier, which we'll talk more about, but yeah, making things easier.
So Forbes last year twenty twenty three, they had you had the seventh youngest billionaire in the world.
For Forbes said.
Those guys.
You know, it was also interesting if you ever, like, like google yourself, which maybe you don't, when people had like their birth date, their birthdate says twenty nine dash dirty, so they're not really sure how old you are.
I guess.
Yeah.
There's all types of media press, a lot of things that are said.
M Yeah.
You know, I got a lot of attention maybe eighteen and twenty four months ago because I needed to make Bolt and myself known to just get customers. So I started doing more publicly, and then Forbes came out with that, and there's a bunch of other and the stuff in the press, and I realized that the press attention comes with a lot of costs. So I've been trying to, you know, stay more low profile these days. I'm not going completely low profile, dude, you know, I.
Don't worry nobody's listening. All right, Well, first and foremost, thank you for joining us.
Appreciate it and thanks for having me. It's an honor.
Yeah. So I think this is gonna be a dope conversation.
We want to talk about raising money, you want to talk about business startups, want to talk about pivoting, all of these things that we talk about as far as entrepreneurship, and that's what the platform is based on. So we actually just got finished watching one of your videos for like twenty minutes and Studio told you about it. So that actually gave me a lot of questions to ask based off of that conversation.
And I think there's a part of the world of business and entrepreneurship that people don't talk about, but I love that you do. And that's the mindfulness, right and the mental health of it, right, because there's a lot that comes on number one, being a founder, but having the risk to say I'm about to change the world yep, and having that belief in yourself, but sometimes really lies in that the people around you don't have a similar belief.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the world's greatest entrepreneurs had a deep sense of purpose and I think a lot of entrepreneurs do. And then as you get caught up in business you start to lose that why, right, and it can really suck the soul out of you to a point where you're forgetting why you're doing what you're doing in the first place. And so you kind of hit
a glass ceiling. And I think re anchoring in that why and staying there as much as you can is what leads to that continue success, continue reinventing of yourself, as we talked about.
So yeah, so.
Let's get into today. So let's talk about bolt start there. So what's the idea for both and what's the from idea to execution to getting it unicorn status?
Yeah, so I started this. I was lucky again in Stanford, grow up in Miami. I'll go through this a little background. Start with Stanford Bitcoin Group in twenty thirteen, eight of us on campus.
A bitcoin like investing group.
No, it's just like students doing research and projects around bitcoin. We're writing papers, we had some professors. We'd get credits for researching bitcoin and super cool. Most of the campus didn't know what bitcoin was or eight of us in it.
A couple of years after it was hundreds and hundreds of kids, but we were the first one to really popularize bitcoin on campus, and I dropped out of school to start something and looked kind of like a coinbase, like make it easy to buy and sell and all that. And I actually went around the country pitching banks on why they should work with us, because we need a bank to work with us.
And so did that Throughout a year.
We lost a couple banking bids to coin base because they had the bigger vcs, they felt more trusted with them. So I'm like, this is going to take me too long to get banks behind me. And so I kind of really have always wanted to build a better PayPal am I gonna find if I do this, I can integrate crypto with it later. And so I had this idea of PayPal two point zero. I'd started some e commerce sites in middle school and I'm like, the checkout is really bad, and so I was like, why don't
we make a better version of this? And I could talk more about how bolt works, but that's that's was the inspiration.
Where did you Because this is early I know now everybody bigcoin.
I mean, if you don't know what it is, it's like where have you been?
But in twenty thirteen, it wasn't very commonly known I kind of was introduced to it because of the music scene, and it was like that was a way to get music from sites that you know, it's almost like illegal to get music, so you had to have a different form of payment. How did you get introduced it and then now bring it to Stanford to say this is something that's going to take over the future.
Yeah, there was this professor whose name was Billagi Shrinovasan who's kind of infamous in Silicon Valley, and so he's teaching this startup engineering class.
So I'm very lucky.
He's the one that, like always he teaches classes and then the kids that in his class pitched and then he invests in the kids.
Yeah yeah, he like in the class, you work on different projects and hackathons. He might invest, might not. I wasn't a center around him investing. But I got very lucky right place, right time. I was very blessed to get into into great school. And and then there was about eight of us who would do these hackathons. He'd have twice a week hackathons because Blagie loved, like, you know, young hackers building his crazy ideas. So he'd go and
we'd build his things. And there are about eight of us who were consistently there to like five or six in the morning and everyone else that went to bed, and so we just started talking and we get a lot of time with them. And then eventually the eight of us were like, we should just form an official club on campus, and this should be around bitcoin. So we started Stanford Bitcoin Group. We got it bussed by the university. We ended up getting like five credits a
quarter for doing research papers on it. So we got out of some classes and just was able to focus on bitcoin, and eventually I was like, this is all I want to focus on. And then I ended up doing the stereotypical dropout Stanford dropout.
So I'm the stereotyped to a t.
So when you start in a company, you have to raise money, you have to like get some help. Like what's the process of actually starting the company of you know, from idea to actually get it up and running.
Yeah, I mean there's a million ways to start a company. For me, I I had like a first attempt at starting a company and ended up complete disaster. I had two other co founders. One was a close friend. One was like this billionaire who got interested in what we were doing, had all this money lined up because of this person's name. That person ended up pulling out for reasons I don't I never was able to uncover my
other co founders, like this is hopeless. I had already dropped out of school, so so now I had no money, I had no co founders, and but I'm dropped out, and so now I look at them like that was such a blessing because they weren't the right people to do the business with. But at the time, I was like, man, I'm super square, dropped out of school, got no money, can't pay for rent. I mean, I don't have investors. So you know, I built an MVP of an app over several months, built it my I then had enough
momentum I got some users on the app. It was a crypto app, kind of like a coinbase or some investors, you know, took notice. I was pitching tons of investors. I got a lot of nos, and then I refigured out how to pitch, and so I got better. I could talk for five hours on fundraising strategy. But you know, I started to get some investors on board. Then you start to hire engineers that are better than you and then you know, you start to get customers.
You know, we went through some pivots. It was really messy.
It's just extreme perseverance. Sometimes the funding comes first, Sometimes the talent comes first, Sometimes the customers come first. Both early days were not pretty at all. I mean it was trying a lot of different things.
So you are these things all self talk, right, because I'm thinking, this is this young man with my.
Was coding in eighth grade, which is this like incredible?
But most times there's a difference, Right, There's a difference between being the CEO of a company and being an engineer or a coder and then somebody who actually actually raised money for that company, right that picture.
So how were you learning those skills?
How you're developing them outside of just saying they told me no, all right, I can't do that. Like what was the strategies and when you were early on trying to get this money from people.
Yeah.
Well, the first thing is I got started young in terms of being able to talk to business people. I started building websites, doing online marketing, found some customers in Miami doing this in high school. So by the time I got to college, I had some business experience.
Not in tech.
But you know, I had some experience when I started raising money. I was doing everything wrong. And like, one of the first rules that I say in my book fundraising is, uh, don't say you're fundraising. As the second you say that you're fundraising and you're on the clock, meaning people are gonna be like, all right, well his round should blow up and be over soon. Because if this is a hot company, I'm gonna have a limited window. So if in two weeks your round isn't done, people
are gonna be like, why aren't others investing? And so they're gonna, you know, they're gonna walk away. And if you build up a bunch of no's around your company people are not investing, then that's you know, the network becomes aware that all these people didn't invest, and you're kind of screwed. So, you know, one of the first lessons that I learned from a great mentor of mine, his name is Michael Cartery, as this company play Co,
very successful gaming company. He was giving some talks on fundraising. Again he taught me this concept, just don't say you're fundraising. Just go build relationships first, go and meet investors and get them excited about who you are as a person and casually.
Get them excited about your idea.
Instead of going and saying I'm pitching you, which automatically puts them on a pedestal versus you.
Right, you're not peers anymore.
Now they're on a pedestal, and so it sets the dynamics incorrectly from the beginning. You're not building a relationship and you can get this domino effect of nose which could really screw you before you even begin. So I did that in the beginning. I learned from those mistakes. I had some great mentors who helped me reshape my fundraising strategy.
So you said something, or say when you said, if you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, asks for money, Yep, that's how I said it correctly. Yeah, so can you elaborate on that.
Yeah, it's a pretty common adage in Silicon Valley and so I certainly didn't invent that. But if you go to someone and you say, hey, I want, you know, to pitch you for funding, they're most likely going to give you advice. It's going to say, hey, you know, I'm not able to fund you right now, but how about I give you some advice. Whereas if you go to them and you show a genuine interest in their advice, but also, potentially even more importantly, you really impress the
shit out of them with who you are. And that person has money or is an investor, they are going to organically want to invest in you.
So let's say I have a company and I'm trying to raise money. I know a very wealthy guy. Instead of saying, hey, do you want to you know, ham I pitched to give me money to put my startup, it'll say, you know, I have this idea, da da dad, and I really respect your your opinion. Would you want to just hear about it just to kind of give me some feedback on it? And then you just do a really great job presenting it. And then they're like, damn, I got to be involved in this situation, but you're not.
You don't look like you're so eager to just only get their money. You really genuinely want their advice. But then by you not wanting to take their money, they want to give you money even more.
Exactly, this approaches a win win makes it more comfortable for them, right because they don't like saying no to you. It makes it more comfortable for you, because if if you're doing a good job, they're gonna want invest. If you're talking to an investor whose job it is to invest, who invests, they need you just as much as you need them. So if you're sitting in front of them and they're like, oh shit, this dude is going to fucking kill it, they will proactively say how can I
get involved? And they're gonna be just as likely, if not more likely, than if you came to them explicitly trying to pitch.
How intentional are you about it? Before you even go to get the advice? Are you strategically targeting the people that you want to get the advice from?
Like, is there a list?
And it's like if I could meet or get in front of this ten or twenty people this month, that's my target.
Like, how did you go about it?
Well, in the beginning, you know, beggars can't be choosers, right, so you kind of will try to get meetings with anyone who has money, right. I mean, now you can be as you go later, Sage, you could be a little more picky, and you should be picking. I mean, you should try to avoid putting sharks on your cap table who are at odds with you or who are very short term istic and they're going to create issues for you. You should avoid those to the maximum extent possible.
But you know what I would do is I would try to build my network in a very strategic way. So I would host like happy hours or dinners. I'd do this on a college budget. I mean I didn't spend I spent minimal money on it. It's like a couple hundred bucks that i'd throw together after a few this VC would sponsor them, so they'd throw down three four hundred bucks on these dinners right and be at my place. Or you know, I didn't spend a lot of money, and so I was building network. So first
step is build network. If people have interconnectivity to investors and play the long game, build a relationship with these folks.
Casually.
Make sure all these people in your network are impressed by you, right casually, and then at some point you can make the asks where you can say, hey, I know this person invests in your company. I think they have this relevant experience of what I'm doing. Do you mind making the intro? And so you do that with you know, all founder friends people will raise money before. You're trying to build this network to cultivate and then
eventually make the ask for the introductions. And you know you're just doing this on repeat as much as possible.
So you said something also where it's like you always want to avoid try and get a know.
Yes, you don't. You never want to get to know.
This is a little bit of the opposite advice that some would give you.
Oh you want to get to know quickly.
Yeah, that's what I've heard. I need not I know well because I come from sales.
So that's what I heard all the time, was like a no is always one step quicker to a yes, or get to the know early or stuff like that.
But so that's an interesting even it feels contradictory.
It's like it's because you go this is trial right, like you're saying, it's because you've got nos.
Yeah, exactly, nose spread.
So you know, investor community or the community you're raising within is small, and so you don't want somebody to go to someone you just pitched and that person say be like I passed right you. Now, if you follow this strategy, you may have had a meeting with that person. It may not have went well, so they may not have invested, but you were never pitching them, so they don't have the ability to say I passed because you never went to them officially asking them for money.
No, It's actually makes a lot of sense psychologically, because like you said, it becomes a virus once one person says no, and then another person acts. This person even if they want to say yes, it's like, well why'd you say no?
Right?
And then it's like, I don't want to be the person that says yes and be an idiot when my friend who I'm I have a high level of respect for said no. So I'm more likely to lean towards the no because that's just where the crowd is going exactly.
And so what you're trying to create is a crowd momentum behind you. The hardest one to get the fall is the first one, and you have to get this person to fall just through your character and your pitch and this strategy that I'm outlining, and then that one will hopefully turn to two or three once you have like three people is the magic number where three people have now casually without you saying you're fundraising, have told
you they want to get behind you. Now you can start a fundraising round with the wind that you're back, because you could say. The way I like to sequence it generally is, even when these people say I want to back you, I won't say, okay, how much? Here's the docs you want to then take a step back once again and say, okay, I'm honored. I'd love to work with you. Let's do another meeting. I'd love to get your advice on these other things. I'd love to
learn how you work with founders. I like to, you know, have this discussion on what working together will look like. I asked for references. Say hey, can I speak to a couple other founders.
You've worked with?
So uh, you know, when someone expresses interest.
You don't just automatically jump and say hey, yeah, I'm ready.
Yeah exactly.
Yeah.
I think that probably feels like the biggest mistake that most people make because you're in so much desperate not desperate need, but you're in need of the funds, and so once you feel it inklink of somebody who's interested, it's like I gotta jump.
You got desperate. You can't.
You can't show the desperation even if you are. I've been desperate many times in my career, even beyond us our seed round, but you can never show it because this is what investors are.
Their job is to sniff out desperation. Ah right. They're experts at this so.
They can get the best deal possible.
So they can get the best deal possible. Exactly.
So, no matter what desperate situation you're in, I mean, you've got to come in with confidence. It's as simple as that. I mean, most people won't give this advice, but I mean it's just the truth.
You said something important, even like you want them to be impressed by you. Now when you're speaking in that language, are you talking about impressed with your knowledge of obviously the business for sure, but the overall sector that you're in, or just as the character of the person.
Predominantly they're going to be investing in you, especially at the early stage. Yeah, most good investors, if they're really impressed by person, as long as the idea is decent, they'll bet on you because they'll bet on your ability to pivot and evolve and come up with even better ideas. So first they've got to be impressed by you. Now, the way you get them impressed by you is by how you speak about yourself and your company, and so you have to have really good answers to questions that
they have about your company. You've had to have thought deeply about the company. You've had to have researched the space. When I talk about my business, I am able to talk about the business extremely well. I'm able to go super meta in terms of talking about where the business fits from a macro lens, in terms of how it plays into trends. I'm able to go very micro and talk about exactly how the product is going to work.
I'm able to go horizontal and talk about competition and what this one's doing well, but what they're not doing well, and what this other one is doing well that you want to integrate into this. And so I'm able to discuss I'm able to talk very intelligently about what I'm building. And this is a reflection of how seriously you know I mean, as a founder, I'm going to take my business.
So this is insightful, not even if you're just raising money, but just in general, because like I said, if you're in sales, everybody's in sales in some capacity. If you're in business, yep, So I mean like the deck. A lot of times people have on a deck, like how much money looking to raise? Right, I'm looking to raise ten million, twenty million? Is that the best way to go about it?
Generally speaking, I say, for seed rounds, no deck, no deck at all, no.
Deck at all.
I've raised many of my rounds with no decks. Seed rounds predominantly because if you haven't impressed the person enough on a relationship level and a conversational level with the business, It's very rare that they're going to look at a deck and be like, oh, I'm this deck is amazing, I now want to invest. They're really making a decision on your relationship. Maybe you have a deck that you go through with them in person. Right, Maybe you're talking
to someone who's a little more traditional really needs a deck. Fine, you can give them a deck, but generally speaking, I like to avoid a deck. Now, everything I'm saying is talking in terms of broad generalizations. Thousands of companies have raised off decks for a seed round. I'm just talking about my methodology, which I also know thousands of founders have used UH and works far better than most methodologies that I've heard. Now fundraising, there's the methodology. And then
there's the luck aspect. Some people get lucky, and for me, I've never really got it just lucky. I've always followed a process and the process has produced luck. I've had luck within the process, but I've never been one of those founders where someone just showed up and was like, I want to back you, or I had a really
deep family relationship or something like that. I mean a lot of my rounds that I've raised were just speaking to tons and tons of people using this process over and over again to generate or effectively party rounds where it's no one single person leading the round, where it's
a bunch of people who get behind the round. Bolt I think necessitated me getting very process oriented at fundraising because in Silicon Valley there's a company that we're tangentially competitive to called Stripe, and all the big vcs are in them, which means they're conflicted out of us, and so I couldn't get the big names the Sequoia or the andreasen Horowitz or Founder's Fund. I couldn't get them
to come into my company. And usually when these vcs, you know, a big name like that, comes in, they take most of the round they put a big anchor check, and then it's the big vcs who provide most of the capital. For me, it was a lot of up and coming firms, angel investors, successful entrepreneurs.
I had to raise party.
Rounds in the early days, and so I think that just made me more systematic and thoughtful.
You talked about the competition, which is interesting because not only do you have to know your business in and out, but you have to kind of know this almost create a competitive mode to be in the space. So like you're you're doing this by yourself, right at this point, there's no partner with you, right, it's just you.
I had a early co founder who was with us for about four years, so it was involved in this early fundraising. We sparred a lot on this and traded notes and really played off each other super well. And then after they departed, then it was just me on all of my other rounds. Since then, I was always leading the fundraise, so you know, that's why I have a particular depth. And then I ended up writing a playbook.
I wanted to get to that.
I wanted to get to that, but because I want people to really understand the amount of time that goes into this. The amount of sacrifice, it's insane, right, Like there's relationships, get sacrifice, friendships, all these sacrifices that no one sees on the front end, but like you're actually dealing with that on top of trying to create something that again is going to be a game changer.
Yeah, I mean everything I'm describing took in extraordinary amount of time. I mean, you know, both seed around probably span three years of doing small check after small check until we had enough traction to raise like an A round which was a little bit bigger, and then our B and C and D round.
We started to get.
Institutional backers who would take big pieces of the round, but in the beginning they were long drawn out or raising on safe which is this instrument called a simple Agreement for future equity, few page agreements that we were raising money onto. And you know another thing that I did is everyone gets consumed with round size.
What's the round size?
For me?
I've always I've raised incrementally, so you know, for both Initially I got a few. Once I started to realize a strategy, I got a few people to lean in. You know, it was like, we're gonna raise a million that filled up pretty quickly, and then you know, we're like, yeah, might as well open another million, as more people became interested or raised another half a million and so.
And then.
When you say, oh, we're you know, we're actually going to raise two We've already raised one. I are fifty percent complete. Versus you know, starting around saying I'm raising two million and I have none. I'd rather start around and say, all right, I have a few people for leading.
They're probably good for half a million, So we're gonna raise a million or seven to fifty k. So the next person I go to, the round's almost done already Versus how most founders saw it off of is there go to someone and none of the round is done. If I'm going to talk to you about around, it's going to be mostly done already before I'm like talking
economics with you, even those people are forward leaning. I'm gonna wait till a few others are forward leaning, and then I'm gonna say, hey, we're doing a million, but I've got about six or seven hundred already circled up. You were one of my early conversations. I'm really excited to have you involved. Let's talk about formalizing your investment.
Good ratey so, and you've raised a lot of money just to put it in contact with people because you're speaking from first hand experience, right. So you talked about the time, but can you like say, like how much time for a founder that's looking to what should they expect they should expect to put two hours out of the day, they should expect to put.
Twelve hours out of the day. Like what's the.
Realistic expectation as far as the time commitment for a founder that is trying to raise money.
I mean, if you're trying to do it properly, it's one hundred of your life.
That's the time for me.
That's the time commitment. You know.
And ideally you have a partner or a head of operations or a CTO that can hold over the fort.
That's running the business, running the business, or you should just be focused on You can't. You can't split your time between running the business and raising money.
This is it.
This is it.
I mean, once you get the hang of it and pass a critical threshold and you're cool to just take some checks casually here and there. Once you're casual and you've you've already crossed the chasm. Great, but until that point, you're one hundred percent. Get someone else in your company, give everyone a heads up that you're going to be
off the grid for a bit. Fundraising. This is all you're focused on, one hundred percent of the focus, and you know, spend a couple hours a day on the business and so you know a lot of people get nervous about fundraising purely because they're not focused on it. So it's never going to happen because this is a thing that requires such intense focus. Need to block off everything else in your life spending on one hundred percent of your time on this thing. You need to go
read my book, which not something I did. This is a labor of love.
What's a book.
It's called Fundraising by Ryan Breslo. Start off as a playbook that I wrote a Google doc that I gave to my friends.
This is a labor of love.
I had no time to write this book, but I made the time because founders needed this wisdom, because I saw too many making the same mistakes over and over again. And so you need to memorize this book, follow it to a t. You put your own style and flavor on it, of course, but really understand it and dedicate one hundred percent of your time to this.
So while you're doing the fundraising and you're one hundred percent dedicated to it, right before this is this when you're the Conscious Culture playbook, because you know that you're not going to be there on a day to day the way that you probably would be if you weren't trying to raise.
Yeah, so that came later for me, but I was creating a playbook on culture. I like systems. Systems scale. If your team doesn't know how it's going to operate what it values, it's very hard to scale your company. And so I don't like repeating myself.
I like.
I like methodology and formula as you can tell for things that I know work.
And so I had a great CEO.
Coach's name is Matt Matari's got a great book, Machari Method that everybody should read on ceoing. He gave me his method, which was my Foundations of Conscious Culture, and then I made it my own. I mean he taught it to me intensively for about three months, and then over the next five years, I kept the document being like, this is what works, this is what doesn't work for me. And so I created my own playbook and then I ended up publishing that to the world on the conscious
dot org, which we're doing we're going to relaunch. It's not where it needs to be right now. But and this is the playbook we used to build and scale Bolt and the Conscious Culture came from more of a spiritual aspiration to bridge humanity with execution. This is this is the marriage that I really wanted to facilitate, and I think Conscious Culture gets to that.
So we talked about raising money, but just business infrastructure. Something else that I heard you say that was pretty insightful as far as you got to be careful with partnerships, right, And a lot of businesses have partners you have a philosophy that's not always the best way to go about it, right.
Yeah. So there's the traditional advice on starting companies, find a co founder.
I give the opposite advice.
I say, don't find the co founder unless you know you're ready to marry somebody. Because this is a marriage. This is even more significant in your marriage. You could have this relation for the next thirty years, for the rest of your life. This is going to define the success of your business. It can also ruin your business. It could ruin your life. This is the most important decision that you're making. For me, I prefer this concept
of a founding rule. So a founding CTO, a founding COO, a founding head of operations where you've made some progress enough to recruit someone exceptional to take a founding X role. It's different than co founder. A co founder implies a double digit percentage of your company that you're sharing with that person. A founding role may be single digits and maybe mid single digits. It could be considerable percentage of your company, but it at least lets you hedge your
bets or not. It protects you because they're probably not on the board initially, they don't have voting control of your company, so you can effectively they're fireable. They're on a vesting schedule, which means if you fire them early, they don't get all their equity. And so I would highly recommend this strategy as the safest strategy. And you
can always give that person more. Right, if you give them five percent of your company, well you can always raise it to ten and then to fifteen and twenty. But it's very hard to strip away take out a co founder. They have rights, they could sue you. You've given a big chunk of the company. You may have wrestled for voting control, So this is much safer path.
Could you break down because even the vesting thing is when I was. This episode is brought to you by P and C Bank. A lot of people think podcasts about work are boring, and sure they definitely can be, but understanding a professionals routine shows us how they achieve their success little by little, day after day. It's like banking with P and C Bank. It might seem boring the safe plan and make calculated decisions with your bank, but keeping your money boring is what helps you live
or more happily fulfilled life. P and C Bank Brilliantly Boring since eighteen sixty five. Brilliantly Boring since eighteen sixty five is a service mark of the PNC Financial Service Group, Inc. P and C Bank National Association Member FDIC.
Erness What's Up?
You ever walk into a small business and everything just works like the checkout is fast, the receipts of digital tipping is a breeze, and you're out the door before the line even builds. Odds are they're using square? We love supporting businesses that run on Square because it just feels seamless.
Whether it's a local coffee.
Shop, a vendor at a pop up market, or even one of our merch partners, Square makes it easy for them to take payments, manage inventory, and run their business with confidence, all from one simple system. If you're a business owner or even just thinking about launching something soon, Square is hands down one of the best tools out there to help you start, run and grow. It's not just about payments, it's about giving you time back so
you can focus on what matters most ready. To see how Square can transform your business, visit Square dot com backslash go backslash eyl to learn more that Square dot com backslash, go backslash eyl. Don't wait, don't hesitate. Let's Square handle the back end so you can keep pushing your vision forward.
An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child in Massachusetts. An MS thirteen gang member from Al Salvador accused of murdering a Texas. Man of Venezuelan charged with filming and selling child pornography in Michigan. These are just some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President Donald J.
Trump's leadership.
I'm Christy nom the United States Secretary of Homeland Security. Under President Trump, attempted illegal border crossings are at the lowest levels ever recorded, and over one hundred thousand illegal aliens have been arrested. If you are here illegally, your next you will be fined nearly one thousand dollars.
A day, imprisoned, and deported. You will never return.
But if you register using our CBP home app and leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.
Do what's right. Leave now.
Under President Trump, America's laws, border and families.
Will be protected.
About the United States Department of.
Homeland Security here you talk about the I'm like, that's pretty brilliant, right, Like you offer equity low digits, maybe it's anywhere between. Would you say anywhere between five, well, one to five percent, or would you even go higher?
It entirely is dependent on the person, their experience, how much they typically get paid, their role, how exceptional they are. Yeah, but by vessel five is a range of it's meant for an exceptional founding role.
Right, But they don't get the five. It has to be worked out where if they're there for a certain amount of time, then it's earned, right.
Yeah, standard is four years. Sometimes I do five years. There's a one year cliff, meaning if they don't make it to at least a year, they don't get anything. It's typically a very bad practice to fire them a month eleven. If you fire them a month eleven, give them eleven months worth you sign off the paperwork. But if they don't make it past six months, they typically don't deserve anything because they weren't a good enough fit. But if it make it past six months, you know
you should give them. You should even though you don't have to until a year, should give them what they earned proportionally. And then yeah, they earn, you know, they earn. Typically it's a monthly vest.
So do you find that I mean, obviously you're hiring these people because you see something in them, but do you see the return is that the dedication to the company has changed because of the equity that can be gained if they potentially obviously outworked what they you saw in them. But long term what this company can potentially.
Be Yeah, uh.
You, I mean I generally like to give people lower salary, higher equity, make sure they're owners in this thing with me. There's some exceptions to that rule, but you know you want missionaries, not mercenaries. You want someone who's all in behind the purpose behind you, who believes you need believer in order to build something from scratch. It's just too hard to hire mercenaries who are just doing it to
get paid. Building STARp is too hard someone who's just doing it to get paid, even if they're one of your employees. It's just they're not going to put in the work required to help make you successful.
So debt equity, that's an interesting term. What does that mean?
So dead dead?
Yeah, debt equity is equity you've mismanaged, meaning you've given it to somebody who is no longer.
A value to your business.
And so if you pick the wrong co founder and they don't do anything when not all of their equity is debt equity, debt equity will destroy your business. The number one thing you need to be striving for is fairness across the cap table that is directly tied to value in the business.
And so.
Fairness is a is a topic that is also rarely discussed, but it's a very important meaning. If you have an a player who has this much equity and they're sitting next to a B player with the same amount of equity, they're gonna be like demoralizing, demoralizing, they're not gonna work
as hard. You want your A player to be all in, and so they even if they don't have transparency into the cap table, people whisper and people talk, and they share notes and they share their information, so they'll find out. You hope they don't find out, but you have to expect that everyone will find out. And you have to have a cap table even if you don't share it with the team, which you shouldn't because it creates too much controversy, but if it was to be shared, you
can stand behind it. This sense of fairness is everything. There's a great sales adage which is feed your eagles, starve your turkeys, so your A players roll out the red carpet. If you're A players, be very generous with them and be players.
You got to get rid of them.
You only you don't have the capacity at a startup to have be players around. That's what other corporations are for, right, That's what those jobs are for. When you're trying to build something from nothing, it is so hard it takes such exceptional ability and effort that you're not in the charity business of job creation. You can do that later on your thousands of people, but there's no charity seat on your team when you're trying to create something out of nothing.
That's a fact.
That's a big fact. You mentioned the cap table and so kind of two fold question. How do you vet I mean early days and now how do you go about vetting who belongs and whos?
How many people are going to be on the cap table?
And then the other part is the board right because most people are not even familiar with what that process is and how many people you should have. The different roles of the board members give a little bit of information about that.
Board is the governing body of your company. It's where votes take place on important corporate decisions. Do we create more option pool, do we prove this round of funding, do we take on this new capital all? The board makes those decisions how much budget do we spend every year? The board is very important from a governance standpoint, but if you set it up wrong could destroy your business.
So if you have the.
Wrong people on there who are out voting you as a founder, don't have the context who aren't in the trenches day in and day out, your business is screwed.
And so.
I believe in found under led boards.
I believe that founders a lot of the great great companies have, you know, initially founder led boards that eventually have some diversification on it. But the simplest way to set up a board is you as a founder. It's just you don't be putting anyone on your board. I don't care how much of a hotshot they are, how big their name is. There's no quicker way to destroy your business than putting somebody with a pedigree on your board too early, because now that person has more gravitas
than you, and they have ego. Typically I'm making generalizations, but I've seen this happen far too many times, and so you've you got to keep things tight in the beginning because you have a vision that is very hard for others to see, and you've got to have ball control to get this to a pretty substantial place before you start to mature.
What about like taking money, Like a lot of times people don't realize, like if you take money too early out of a company, it could it could ruin the company, right like, what's your advice for founders that, But it's still difficult because you still have to eat and you still have to provide for yourself, or if you have a family, you got to prove off for your family too.
So how do you.
Balance that reinvesting money in the company to grow it, but still kind of maintaining your life as well.
You as a founder, you're going to become an expert at balancing and juggling and many things in your life. I wish that someone taught me the importance of health early on. I didn't know the first thing about health, so I was you know, nowadays I focus deeply on health, family friendships, you know, my nonprofit work business I'm able to balance. In the beginning, I had no balance. I mean, I was just abusing my body to just crank on
the business. To some degree that that is necessary. And on the other hand, if I were to go back to my younger self, I would say focus on some of these other things too. But generally speaking, yeah, to get something, to create something from nothing, which we've all done here, we know the sacrifice required. It's an extraordinary level of sacrifice and there's really no way around that.
Well, let's get to where we left off and dovels.
You were super excited and you were telling me about the one thing that the world needs. I told you love. You're like exactly, and I was like, you like, when you hear it, what do you think. I'm like, it's the universal language. It's what gets everybody through part of their life. And you're like yeah, And then you were about to go into this. I said, save it. We got to sit down and record it. So talk to us about love, its mission and how you got to this point.
So I have been on my own spiritual journey, health, family, different communities that I'm involved in, and the last three years, I say that's become a bigger part of my life. I call spirituality broadly. And what I've learned is that there are a lot of problems we have in the world today that the many of us are that our government, our society, our corporations are largely ignoring one hundred and thirty million Americans are chronically ill. A massive chunk of
those to a more chronic illness. I think it's like fifty million have four more, thirty million out five or more. We're sicker than ever before. If you go and look at the charts around Crone's disease, Celiacs, autism, Parkinson's diabetes. They're they're through the roof. It's one in thirty kids are being born with autism these days. Used to be one in thirty thousand. On the flip side, our planet is getting destroyed. Forty five trillion dollars I think I
saw stat recently. Forty five trillion dollars of our global annual GDP is made in an unsustainable way, meaning it's extracted from nature. So you know what this wall is made out of, and that lamp and this microphone and this table all came from nature. It came from somewhere that was once natural habitat with animals and insects and all this gorgeous nature, and that was ripped apart to
put these things here. Our couch is everything right, and so we're doing we're taking from the sure we're nature's getting destroyed. We're using very harmful chemicals. And all of our products, our soaps or shampoos or toothpaste or laundry detergent or linens, the furniture, the toxins that are emitted as fumes into our households were breathing in all day or getting absorbed into our skin and our blood all day,
which is creating the sickness. So I became frankly petrified about where our planet is headache, and so I asked the question. I was like, how do we solve these gargantuan problems? And I realized that nothing is going to change until a change where our money goes. Where money goes is where energy flows. So if they say you vote once every four years for your president, well you're voting every single day for what corporations you support and
what practices you support. So if you're trying to vote good in politics, but every day you're buying things on Amazon that are made for chemicals that are bad for your health, that are bad for the planet, that's destroying the planet, that's eviscerating small businesses who try to innovate and get ripped off, which is what's happening with most
of our dollars, horrible work conditions. We're voting for all these things every single day, and so we wonder why the world is in such a bad shape when we're voting for these horrible things. We're voting for illness, destruction of nature, horrible work conditions, and a visceration of small business. We're voting for that every day when we shop, and
we wonder why these problems exist. So I had this crazy idea of building an inverted Amazon or instead of the it's the cheapest, lowest cost, you know, suppliers, it's not. We're not gonna make it more expensive. We're going to prioritize small businesses. Instead of ripping off the small businesses, We're going to prioritize small businesses. Instead of letting anything on the store, We're gonna let only products that pass
our standards around uh chemicals, toxins. We're gonna do the homework on behalf of consumers, and we're gonna look at sustainability and so we're gonna hold high standards and build a new everything store. We call it the clean green Everything Store, which is love dot com. When you think of the name love dot com, so or love meets commerce.
And so this is.
The bridge that we're building. And I'm sorry if I'm talking a little too long on just finish for consumers, where today it's way too hard. Let's say you want to vote with your dollars and vote for better values. Well, if you're gonna search non toxic deodoran or sustainable furniture, it's too much work like Google search and find the brands, research the brand, separate site, separate shopping experiences, one stop shop.
With love dot Com, you can search for anything and everything you find is passed a certain threshold of our Love standards and it's generally speaking, good for your body, good for a planet, good for small business.
So it's all is there a name for that? Like environmental friendly?
Is it? What's the name? Like?
Like, yeah, we're calling it the clean Green Everything Store.
So anything in society that you want but done ethically.
Yeah, made with love. All products that are made with love are made ethically. Now, not everything is perfect. We have a page that describes our standards. Not everything is perfectly sustainable or perfectly organic, but it has enough the businesses are trying hard enough where we say, all right, they're trying hard enough, They've done enough things where it's past our standards and they can make it on the Love marketplace.
So this is like Amazon for companies that operate at the highest ethical.
Level exactly exactly, and to give the ethical consumers the same shopping experience as Amazon, because right now they have to spend way too much time shopping, discovering, research. Now they have one place to go for everything they need to purchase.
Focusing on small businesses specific.
YEP, ninety five plus percent of the brands and products on our site are made by small businesses.
And it's everything from clothing to groceries.
Yeah, clothing, groceries, bedding, beauty, bath baby. We're adding we have over ten thousand skews on the site now. We want to be at thirty thousand by end of this month, sixty thousand by the following month. So we're sourcing products morning till night, and uh yeah, I'm super excited about it.
I think the first thing we laughed about, I'm like, love dot you trademarked that.
I'm like, how did you get love do? Nobody had that?
And then I was like, okay, I first thought maybe you said you wanted to solve something in the world, and you said, what's the number one thing that affects our world?
And we left there and I was when I left.
I'm like, I must be talking about health, but the health of the environment, the health of the world really in a sense so you have both and you have love dot com. Is this now all the practices that you've learned, you're now implementing them in real time and I'm doing this again.
I can do it again exactly because with both, we're giving every shop the Amazon.
One click experience.
So we have some great customers like Revolve, Fanatics, Asper Sacks off Fifth who. Now when you go in your shop, there you have this incredible one click Amazon one click experience. It's powered by bolts. So I've been spending the last ten years building streamline and commerce experience.
Who are your other clients because everything you just said, I've shopped in the last month, and I even have any idea.
Well, see, it works in a this kind of magical way where we're not like a PayPal or an Apple pay or Google pay, where the button is front and center, it redirects you somewhere else.
It's just native on the site.
So if you start typing in your email and we have your account, we'll be like, hey, you already have an account. Enter one time code sent your phone, You enter one time code, all of your information is preloaded.
And then you click pay.
And so the bolt as opposed to these other wallets is embedded and native to the merchant site. That's our unique innovation. And so yeah, we've got hundreds and hundreds of retailers.
Both is.
God willn't going to have a breakout year this year. We're signing major brands as the ones I've listed and many others, and we're just there's a domino effect of retailers. We've got eighty million shoppers on the network now, which is massive. You know, two years ago, I think it was like eleven or twelve million shoppers on our network.
So the network is expanding rapidly. The goal with both is to build is to let everyone build their own have their own Amazon one click checkout experience where there's no different shopping from Reva to Casper to Amazon.
So are you now splitting the time on the how are you balancing that?
So I'm very lucky.
I've got a CEO named Madu and a president named cal who are very senior executives at Amazon on uh think of them as like unhireable executives. Col is an SVP at Amazon, reported directly from Bezos to Bezos with CEO Drugstore dot Com and Besos on is board. Modu
in all global logistics at Amazon, domestic and international. So their toughest business unit arguably that they put like their best executive into that was Maju, So Modu and Cal basically run circles around me at the higher stages of scaling. So I basically I'm chairman of both, but I'm not CEO, I'm not president. I'm not operating day to day. I check in with them regularly, we do board meetings, I get updates constantly, and I'm kind of actively overseeing as
a chairman. Uh. And then Love, I'm the CEO, so I'm doing one on ones with the team every day. I'm running, you know, I'm spending you know, morning till night on. So Love is my main operational folk Gus.
But a few questions, So, yeah, how did you trademark Love? Did you trade? Can you trademark Love?
You can trademarket and certain classifications so we can use Love in certain capacities and more to comm as we're applying for it. But it's an interesting question, r can you actually trademark Love? We actually had some companies who were who were also named Love who tried to challenge us on this and say, oh you can't use love We're already using it. We worked out some settlements with them to say, hey, we won't use it in these categories for this amount of time. But it is an
interesting question. Can you actually trademark Love? What matters to me is I had that Love dot com.
So so you pay.
You had to pay for that, though we had to pay off.
I know that somebody had it already. Yeah.
Yahoo had it.
Yeah, oh man, Yeah, that's it.
Was it an active site or they just was.
No, they weren't using it.
There was some old Yahoo email addresses where you could choose love as you're like, they had Yahoo and a million other bell South, all these options, right, you could choose love dot com as one of your options, as your extension. But they had mostly stopped using it, and so when I found out they owned it, I was like,
this is good news and bad news. The good news is they're kind of I think they're run by this group, Apollo Group, and there's very financially minded folks, which means they're not planning on doing anything creative with it, right, It's just a private equity operation. So I was like, all right, well, there might actually be willing to sell it. They're just going to charge a high price. That's exactly what happened. That's a bad news exactly.
So you built both up. What's bolt valuation now.
Well, our last investor around was there, seriously round it was about two years ago, and that was an eleven billion valuation.
So you built both up. Eleven billion valuation. That's up and running.
You stepped away in the swords because you have management team that's running the company. You're not running it, and now you're focusing on love. Right, that's your new So what's the brain process of building something that's you know, very few people are going to reach that level of successful one company, right, and then now you have to go and start the process all over again. Right, it's
a lot of work. Now you're kind of back to day one as far as not back to day one as far as resources, but back to theay one as far as doing the work.
What's the thought.
Process Because a lot of people would think, if I've reached that level of success, then I'll just ride it out until I sell the company or take a public corgeous whatever like you know.
And can we add that, yeah, you're not even in I guess a prime of life yet, right, Like you're not thirty five yet. Like when most people reach millionaire status that they hit that it's around that time or they have the creative idea to do it, so it's again.
Yeah, sometimes I wonder what got into me. It's a crazy idea that I just can't get out of my head, this idea for love dot com. And I say it was very blessed. The universe blessed me because this wasn't the plan. I was going to operate both till the end of time. And my COO was Madju. One of my biggest biggest hires was Modu as my COO andto but then more and more people I wanted to report into him.
He was so good.
I was just like, all right, well, you can take customer success all right, you can take engineering, all right, you can take finance all right, you can take legal all right. Well I kind of just want to have the whole company report into you because you're so much better at managing than I am. And then I was like,
I'm like, Maji, you're basically running the company. I should just help empower you and unleash the beast because he's a beast and you step into CEO and I'll be chairman and I'll open doors for customers, I'll help with raises, I'll help, I'll help accelerate things, and I'm gonna go work on some other ideas at the same time. And then Modu hired cal And and then you know, now these guys are ripping, and so I got lucky, very very lucky.
This wasn't the plan at all.
So what about the crypto savings.
Yeah, so Eco is a whole separate story. But I basically didn't want my crypto ideas around ease of use in crypto to go to have to wait or to die. So in parallel, I got some friends together and I said, let's do this thing. It was originally called Beam, and then we had this one of the founders of Uber, the original founder, Garrett Camp, was working on something called Eco, and we decided to join forces and he'd give us the brand, we'd give him some piece of what we
were doing, so it became Eco. It's a much longer story, but it's run by one of my closest friends in the world named Andy Bromberg, who's a Stanford friend of mine, also in the Stanford Bitcoin group. So I ran it with a few other friends in the beginning. Andy then joined fears in took over a CEO. So there's about four or five. There's about five of us as co founders there. I originated it, but these guys get all the credit. I kind of got it going. It was a ton of work. And but yeah, they have a
wallet called Beam. Beam is like Venmo, but on chain, so it's the easiest way to use crypto on the chain versus coinbase, which is off chain. And they have a currency called eco Currency, which is super cool. It's like a semi stable coin. There's a panel of economists who vote on the monetary policy, so it's kind of it's a decentralized governance around inflation of the coin and all of this. So it's an amazing project and I think is going to have some big years coming up.
You started the Bitcoin Board in twenty thirteen.
I wonder what your thoughts around the space as you watch you know, most recently the Bitcoin etf could pass, and that, you know, just the hype around it. Knowing that in twenty thirteen you are trying to convince people that this is the thing of the future. You're going to financial institutions. You're probably like, kid, get out of here. You know what I'm talking about, And now here we are regulation ETFs.
What was going through your mind during that time?
Well, in twenty thirteen, I remember we had a dinner and or maybe it's twenty fourteen, and a bunch of people asked, or I think bitcoin will be in a decade, and I said, And at the time it was maybe tens of dollars, and I said, I think it's going to be one hundred thousand dollars a coin. And it's kind of been tracking to that almost exactly to the decades. So it's not quite there yet, but it's getting pretty close.
And so I mean, it's been an amazing journey. I think we saw in the beginning merchant adoption we thought was going to be the big thing. Then that didn't have a lot of volume. Then then there's a second way of merchant adoption. It started to get some volume.
We now have.
Obviously ordinals on bitcoin, we have THEEUM which is doing remarkably well, which provides all this new functionality on top of the chain. I think ETFs are huge because the number one value prop of bitcoin and crypto is being able to store it yourself. But the reality is not everybody wants to. So just to have a financially regulated security that you can buy that gives you exposure for a ninety percent of people who don't want to manage a wallet off chain or on chain is uh is massive.
It's it's beyond massive.
I can imagine how surreal it is, as you know, as somebody who was trying to build a wallet so that people could sympathize and have their crypto coin bitcoin store to now saying all right, well there's an ETF here you go.
It's a dream come true. It's incredible.
So so you also champion a four week, a four day work week.
Right, yep, So talk about that.
So what I realized is that we have a big problem in the typical workplace, which is that most of corporate America, at least what I've seen is that everyone is perpetually exhausted, and so they're work in five days a week. They're in a bunch of monotonous meetings of doing work. They're not even sure as important. They have to catch up on work on the weekends while they take care of their families, and you know, no one can ever catch up.
And so.
Forty work week is tied in with a few concepts, but the underpinning is that I've tried to figure out in my companies is how to eliminate what I call work theater. And this is a phrase that most of the things I talk about I've used from others. This is a phrase that I coined work theater. Most of the work that people do doesn't matter. I'd say ninety percent is work theater, meaning it's work that just looks good but doesn't actually accomplish anything.
Right.
And so people working so much, they're so exhausted, and they're getting nothing done for the company because they're consumed with red tape and bureaucracy. And so what I found is by shortening the work week and say no, you don't have five days to get everything done. You've got four days to get everything done. You can't schedule meetings Friday through Sunday. You need to expect people are going to be off these four days. You're going to be
present focused. This I took from Twitter is not mine. It's called work like a lion, not like a cow.
Right.
I want my team to come in and work like lions. For four days as much as they can, and then I want them to go relax, be with their family, be with their friends, enjoy life, heal so that they can come and work like lions. I think as human beings, we're supposed to go hunt and then we're supposed to go relax. We spend too much time in this middle ground. So to me, I found much more productivity when we have these intense spurts of hunting and then were ever people have their own lives, So.
All your employees work for four days?
Yes and no?
Uh.
We try to adhere to it with love. With both, it's been experiments, so both has it rolled out, but both his later stage could maybe afford to do it a little bit more love. We're trying to do it, but we still end up working a lot of fridays. So I can't say fully that we're doing it with love right now, but we're trying. We're being mindful of it.
And you champion remote work, right Yeah.
All my companies are one hundred percent remote. I never want to go back to an office again, and that's just the personal choice that I made.
And other hubs.
So some folks, there's a cluster in San Francisco, or a cluster in New York or cluster in LA and they meet up. They may have shared workspaces. So there's certain clusters that like to come together into my various companies and work a prism. Another one of my companies has a bona fide office, but they have a pretty kind of hardcore sales culture and it fits them.
So you know, I do.
One of my companies does have a bona fide office, but it's not something that I'm that I'm married to at all, and I typically prefer remote.
So you got both has eight hundred employees.
No, both has gone down by quite a bit.
We've just realized that with our narrow focus on going after the world's largest customers, we didn't need as many people and many headcounts. So we actually completely removed our focus on SMB just small, small and medium sized businesses to focus on big accounts. So we brought the company. Now it's below two hundred. How many you d love about fifteen.
Right, And so you have that, but you also have the nonprofit work, yes, and I know that's very important to you talk about that.
I believe that spiritually we're supposed to give at least ten percent, if not twenty percent, of what you make back. This is my fundamental belief. I believe if you don't do that, you're hurting yourself because you're gonna have you're creating karma. And so selfishly, I want to stay healthy, I want to stay safe.
I want my.
Businesses to be successful. So so I try to give back as much as I can because I know spiritually you have to. It's not a lot of people say, oh, we're going to wait until later in life, that's a proven thing to do. I don't believe in that at all. I think you have to always be giving back to the community. It has to become a muscle that becomes ingrained in you. So I have a few different impactulated initiatives. My most prominent nonprofit is called the Movement. So dance
has completely changed my life. It was a healthy outlet for me that got me through many tough times in a very healthy way. And so I realized that dancing is one of the most scalable ways to spread happiness and mental health because all you.
Need is a floor and a speaker.
So if you're going to try to solve a mental health crisis at a homeless shelter, refugee camp, it's very difficult. You have to hire if you're gonna have to hire a psychiatrists, it's one on one or one hundred of dollars per hour. Other methodologies are not very scalable or very expensive. Dance you know, flour in a speaker, and
so we started. We did some work with some homeless shelter, some disabled centers, after school programs, and then we realize that we can go do refugee camps where there's one hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering. So we've picked one of the largest in Africa called Biddy Biddy and two hundred and fifty thousand refugees in Uganda. Then a massive suicide crisis, a massive mental health crisis. I think it's something like thirty or forty percent of their
residents is they are depressed. It's like a ten percent annual suicide right, don't quote me on that, but I mean it's those proportions and a lot of the folks that have nothing to live for, and so the goal is to give them something to live for. That is a force that we could afford. So we partnered with another nonprofit who created. This stage is like performance stage, and we do the programming, dance programming, and we have people coming say this is what they now live for.
This has changed their life. They didn't take their life because of this. Emma is flourishing and we did almost nothing. We created some curriculum, we trained some people on the ground. We're not fishing for them. We don't hire people to go out and teach me. There's thousands of incredible dancers
already as refugees. So we just put a little program together and they've taken the ball and they run with And now we go back every six months check in, help give them advice on how to manage the program. So now I want to scale this to shelters, homeless, refugee schools. This is my biggest passion for charity.
Well, it was extremely insightful conversation for sure. Anything any last words you want to leave the audience.
With, Well, once again, so honored to be here. Uh, so grateful that we're doing this. After giving our talk, I know we've we've all three of us have been through similar journeys. So you guys have built such an incredible platform that's lifting others up. Too many of us become successful. We don't share the secrets. We don't build
the bridges. I know a lot of folks who want to burn the bridges to get to where they are, right, and so I think you guys are building tons of bridges and just excited to build some great bridges and share some great knowledge with you guys.
I appreciate it. Appreciate appreciate it.
Thank you.
Like I said, it was extremely insightful. So thank you for taking the time out of your schedule. And you you got a lot going on, and I look forward to, you know, doing some other stuff, but you're in the future.
Yeah.
Likewise, all right, God, thank you for rocking us. We'll see you next week.
Pete, please love.
An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child in Massachusetts. An MS thirteen gang member from Al Salvador accused of murdering a Texas man of Venezuelan charged with filming and selling child pornography in Michigan. These are just some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President Donald J.
Trump's leadership. I'm Christy Noman, the United States.
Secretary of Homeland Security under President Trump. Attempted illegal border crossings are at the lowest levels ever recorded, and over one hundred thousand illegal aliens have been arrested. If you are here illegally, your next you will be fine nearly one thousand dollars a day, imprisoned, and deported.
You will never return.
But if you register using our CBP home app and leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.
Do what's right, leave now.
Under President Trump America's laws, border and families will be protected.
Sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security,